As expected , MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s big reveal on President Donald Trump’s tax returns attracted a huge audience on Tuesday and set a record for the show, while ranking as the third-most viewed program on television that night.

Maddow racked up a show-record 4.13 million total viewers, trailing only NBC’s “This is Us” and CBS’s “NCIS: New Orleans,” for the night in the 9 p.m. time slot. The show was also the No. 1 cable news show in the 25-54 demo with 1.43 million viewers.

Despite those record-setting numbers for the show, it didn’t appear to hurt Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who finished behind Maddow with 3 million viewers. That was in line with his show’s average numbers, meaning that few, if any, conservatives abandoned him for Maddow’s fake news.

Maddow received criticism from both conservatives and liberals for her hyping of the two pages of Trump’s 2005 tax return that destroyed the liberals’ charge that Trump hadn’t paid any taxes. In an interview with the Associated Press, Maddow tried to blame viewers for setting their expectations too high:

“Because I have information about the President doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a scandal. It doesn’t mean that it’s damning information. If other people leapt to that conclusion without me indicating that it was, that hype is external to what we did.”

Unlike Geraldo Rivera, who was pilloried after his Al Capone vault debacle, Maddow knew that what was in the Trump tax returns wasn’t damning, yet she still hyped it on Twitter and played her audience for fools, thereby becoming the epitome of fake news.

Comments

The Trump White House confirmed that the tax return was genuine. That would seem to be the opposite of “fake news.”

Tim Morse

When did AIM become right-wing? It’s been a couple years since I read anything here, but I’m not sure I’ll be back. Most articles seem to be transparent about their political bent. Weird.

mioahu

there is always MSNBC and Rachel Maddau for you

Geri Alexander

Rachel Maddow was literally EXPOSED in her FAILING liberal, back-firing “quest” to shade the POTUS. She & her story were a bust, hands down! She had nothing, & had led on that she had something, not only in her pre-show Twitter rants but even during her show’s segments & all the way up to the minute. That’s not only “fake news”, that’s “deceiving news”!

Hey Rach, hope you liked those ratings…your credibility is now shot for sure without question & you’ve deemed yourself as one who is incompetent of performing their essential job function as a journalist – reporting the news without bias or bipartanship! You should all be fired.

ThraceThrice

It would appear that your definition of “wing-ness” depends on whose sacred cows are gored, Tim.

ThraceThrice

Ms. Maddow is fighting for her show. If she can somehow claim to “speak for the resistance” (in the childish parlance of social democrats these days), she can hang onto her show and her salary. Otherwise, it’s into the Olbermann-wilderness…

tkrepel

Maddow had something no other journalist has been able to come up with — a copy of Trump’s federal tax returns. Overhyped, perhaps, but definitely not nothing.

Why are you so eager to denigrate Maddow? Because she reported something you don’t want made public?

mioahu

Eh , CRAPEL, back from the echo chambers ? Because she is a leftist lying disgusting opinion peddler. And about making that public, go TRUMP, it just benefited him, just in case that was not circulated in the MSNBC like fake news that you follow